Vivid Images

I just finished weekly group discussions on CS Lewis's Miracles. It is more a philosophical book than a theological one, though it keeps its theism and then Christianity in focus throughout. It is tough sledding in places for that reason, requiring close attention. Yet one of the ways that Lewis makes this a bit easier along the journey is by using vivid images, slipped in even unnoticed, to make the point. In the following two sections, one from Chap XI "Christianity and Religion" and one from Chap XIV "The Grand Miracle" I have italicised a short but vivid section in each that helps the reader along. First, they do illustrate the point accurately. Lewis is refuting a good deal of possible counterargument with his comment about the shoe.  He is heading off possible complaints that you did not even know you had. And in his description of Jesus sharing our earthly lot with the image of almost-defeated soldiers captures much of what is indeed wearying in this life. He doesn't strictly need to include such homely examples to make his point, but we are glad he does.

Plus he is also giving us a short rest in our intense race forward in thinking. Just a quick breather, but it grounds us back in our own world, reassuring us that we are not going to be let out on an impossibly long kite string.

Now this imagined history of religion (Ed. note: the gradual improvement from primitive anthropomorphic "spirits" to the pure abstraction of mind-as-such, which is pantheism) is not true. Pantheism certainly is (as its advocates would say) congenial to the modem mind ; but the fact that a shoe slips on easily does not prove that it is a new shoe — much less that it will keep your feet dry. Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. It may even be the most primitive of all religions, and the oienda of a savage tribe has been interpreted by some to be an ‘all pervasive spirit’. It is immemorial in India. The Greeks rose above it only at their peak, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle ; their successors relapsed into the great Pantheistic system of the Stoics. Modem Europe escaped it only while she remained predominantly Christian; with Giordano Bruno and Spinoza it returned. 

Humanity must embrace death freely, submit to it with total humility, drink it to the dregs, and so convert it into that mystical death which is the secret of life. But only a Man who did not need to have been a Man at all unless He had chosen, only one who served in our sad regiment as a volunteer, yet also only one who was perfectly a Man, could perform this perfect dying; and thus (which way you put it is unimportant) either defeat Death or redeem it. 

Lewis mentions with great approval that Plato does the same, and so is much more readable than most books about him.  There is the Allegory of the Cave and the Allegory of the Sun, and also the charioteer driving two horses in tandem, the rational and the irrational. 

I try to do this when I remember and sometimes it works. But more often I have to fall back on the literarily cheaper hack of getting some illustrations or video clips inserted, or breaking up the page with an unrelated video, like an entr'acte in the theater.  Which I am now going to find before my third and last fantasy football draft.  

Update: Or like illuminated manuscripts, which is also way cooler than what I do.